Estimation of Doppler Centroid in DBS Processing and its Application in Real-Time SW on ForwardLooking Airborne Radar

Conference: EUSAR 2012 - 9th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
04/23/2012 - 04/26/2012 at Nuremberg, Germany

Proceedings: EUSAR 2012

Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Bickert, Bernhard (CASSIDIAN-Electronics, Wörthstr. 85, 89077 Ulm, Germany)

Abstract:
The estimation of the Doppler Centroid is a common digital signal processing step in Doppler Beam Sharpering (DBS) air-to-ground radar mode. Such a radar mode is commonly implemented for ForwardLooking (in the direction of the aircraft longitudinal axis) Airborne Radar with scanning antenna, to generate a radar image with a cross-range resolution higher than the corresponding antenna real beam resolution. In DBS mode radar sub-patches are sticked together to generate a radar image of the region-of-interest. Besides the inherent radar resolution and sensitivity, the radar image quality mainly depends on the result of the sticking process to display the correct size and direction of objects, which are stretched across different adjacent radar sub-patches. In this poster, a Doppler Centroid estimation approach is presented, which is based on the magnitudes of onechannel range-Doppler data. Inertial Navigation System (INS) data are used for a rough estimation of the Doppler centroid. Depending on INS data accuracy, additional processing steps are incorporated to achieve a robust estimation of the Doppler Centroid. The approach is developed on synthetic radar data and continuously improved by use of real flight data. Some typical results from real-time software are presented.